In A Dark House
In A Dark House
Deborah Crombie
An abandoned Southwark warehouse burns next door to a women’s shelter for victims of spousal abuse. Within it lies the charred corpse of a female body burned beyond all recognition. At the same time, workers at Guy’s Hospital anxiously discuss the disappearance of a hospital administrator – a beautiful, emotionally fragile young woman who’s vanished without a trace.
And in an old, dark rambling London house, nine-year-old Harriet’s awful fears won’t be silenced – as she worries about her feuding parents, her schoolwork… and the strange woman who is her only companion in this scary, unfamiliar place.
Gemma James and Duncan Kincaid – lovers and former partners – have their own pressing concerns. But they must put aside private matters to investigate these disturbing cases. Yet neither Gemma nor Duncan realize how closely the cases are connected – or how important their resolutions will be for an abducted young child who is frightened, alone… and in serious peril.
Deborah Crombie
In A Dark House
The tenth book in the Duncan Kincaid / Gemma James series, 2004
To the memory of Fleur Lombard
Who died in the line of duty
February 4, 1996
Avon Fire Brigade, England, U.K.
Why have you suffer’d me to be imprison’d,
Kept in a dark house…
– William Shakespeare,
Twelfth Night
1
London… Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes – gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.
CHARLES DICKENS
Bleak House
It took no more than a match, nestled beneath the crumpled paper and foil crisp packets. The flame smoldered, then flared and crackled, and within seconds tongues reached out for the bottom layer of furniture stacked so conveniently on the ground floor of the old warehouse. Nothing burned like polyurethane foam, and the cheap chairs, sofas, and mattresses removed from the flats on the upper floors of the building were old enough not to have been treated with fire retardants.
A gift. It was a gift. He could hardly have asked for more if he had assembled the ingredients for a perfect fire himself. The furniture would generate enough heat for flashover, then the old wooden floorboards and ceiling joists would blaze with a beautiful fury. The fire would take on a life of its own, separate from its creator.
And the fire had power, that he had learned early on, power to exhilarate, power to transform, power to induce wonder and terror. He had first read about the great Tooley Street fire of 1861 in school, which seemed to him now an odd place to have discovered a life’s calling.
The conflagration had burned for two days and consumed over three hundred yards of wharf and warehouse, damage unequaled since the Great Fire of 1666, damage not to be seen again until the Blitz.
There had been other fires, of course: the Mustard Mills in 1814, Topping’s Wharf in 1843, Bankside in 1855; it seemed to him that fire was as necessary to Southwark as birth and death, that it provided an essential means of growth and regeneration.
Heat began to sear his face; the skin across his cheekbones and forehead felt stretched, his nostrils began to sting from the smoke and escaping gas. The blaze was well under way now, burrowing deep into the pile of furniture, then licking out in unexpected places. It was time for him to go, but still he lingered, unable to tear himself from the energy that gave him more than a sexual charge – it was a glimpse into the heart of life itself. If he gave himself up to it, let it consume him, would he at last know the truth?
But still, he resisted complete surrender. Shaking himself, he blinked against the stinging in his eyes and took a last look round, making sure he had left no trace. Satisfied, he slipped out the way he had come. He would watch from a distance as the fire mounted to its inevitable climax and then… then there would be other fires. There were always other fires.
Rose Kearny liked night duty best, when the station was quiet except for the muted murmur of voices in the staff room as everyone went about their assigned tasks. There was something comforting about the camaraderie inside held against the dark outside, and in the easing of the adrenaline rush after a call-out. And she considered herself lucky to have ended up at Southwark, the station where she had trained, and the most historic in the London Fire Brigade.
She and her partner, Bryan Simms, were checking their breathing apparatus after the first bell of the night – a little old lady in a council flat, having decided to make herself a bedtime snack, had dozed off with the chip pan on the burner. Fortunately, a neighbor had seen the first sign of smoke, the blaze had been easily contained, and the woman had escaped serious injury.
But every fire call, no matter how minor, required a careful examination of any equipment they had used. Tonight she and Bryan had been assigned BA crew and their lives depended on the efficiency of their breathing apparatus – and on each other. Simms, at twenty-three a year older than Rose, was as steady and reliable as his square, blunt face implied, and not inclined to panic.
He looked up at her, as if sensing her regard, and frowned in concentration. “‘What’s in a name?’” he asked, as if continuing a conversation. “‘That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.’”
For a moment, Rose was too startled to respond. Not that she wasn’t used to being teased about her name, or her fair looks, but this was the first time one of her fellow firefighters had resorted to Shakespeare.
Taking her silence as encouragement, Bryan went on, grinning, “‘But earthlier happy is the rose distilled, than that which withering on the virgin thorn grows, lives, and dies in single blessedness-’”
“Piss off, Simms,” Rose interrupted, smothering a laugh. She had to admit she was impressed he’d gone to the trouble of memorizing the line. “I’d never have taken you for a Shakespeare buff.”
“I like the second one. It’s from A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” said Simms, and she wondered if she had imagined a blush in his dark skin as he bent again over his task.
“You don’t say,” Rose retorted with a smile. “And Romeo and Juliet as well. Aren’t you the clever one.” Her father, a high school English teacher, had begun quoting Shakespeare to her before she could talk. “Look sharp there,” she added, glancing at his neglected equipment. “You don’t want to miss a crack in that hose.”
She’d started with the Southwark Fire Brigade six months before Bryan, and she never missed an opportunity to remind him of her seniority. It was hard enough, being female in what was still basically a man’s profession, and she certainly couldn’t afford a partner with some half-baked romantic idea about their relationship.
Rose meant to go far, perhaps even divisional officer one day, and she wasn’t about to let an entanglement stand in her way. Not that she was averse to a night out and a bit of a recreational cuddle, but not with someone on her own ground. And the job left no time for a real relationship. If you wanted to be good, you had to eat it, sleep it, breathe it. She wanted more than the ability to put a fire out; she wanted to understand the why and how, and fire investigation was a way to move up in the ranks.
It was now after midnight, and she intended to use her downtime to study if things remained quiet. She’d just stowed the BA set and pulled out her books when the bells went for the second time that night.
Rose felt the familiar jolt of adrenaline, and then she and Bryan and the rest of the watch were running for the pole-house. Descending to the appliance bay, they began rigging in fire gear as the duty officer called out “Pair” over the tannoy, meaning that both the pump and the pump ladder were
needed. As if of their own volition, Rose’s hands performed the familiar rituals: fastening her tunic, tightening the throat buckle, pushing back her hair before slipping on her helmet and adjusting the chin strap, clasping her belt so that the weight of the small axe rested against her hip.
The station officer, Charlie Wilcox, ripped the call slip off the teleprinter. “It’s just round the corner – warehouse in Southwark Street,” he told them. “Sounds like it’s well away – we’ll need sets on this one.”
Within seconds they were aboard the appliance and rolling into Southwark Bridge Road, sirens wailing and blue lights flashing. A fine drizzle blurred the September night, slicking the tarmac and haloing the street lamps. As they swung round into Southwark Street, Wilcox called out from the front, “It’s showing.”
As the pump came to a stop, Rose saw a bank of smoke hanging heavily over the street, and in the lower windows of a brick Victorian warehouse, the telltale red-orange flicker of light. Acrid smoke stung her nostrils as she leapt from the appliance and pulled on her mask. She caught a glimpse of huddled bystanders as Wilcox said, “Rose, Bryan. It looks as though the worst of it is still confined to the ground floor. Take in a guideline and check for occupants.” He turned to his sub officer, Seamus MacCauley. “Check round the back, will you, Seamus? See what we’ve got.”
The other BA team from the pump ladder was already laying hose line as Rose and Bryan tallied in their breathing apparatus, checked their radios. “Door’s open,” she heard Wilcox shout as she pulled her visor down, and she registered a faint surprise before focusing again on her task.
They went in low, Rose leading, peering through the smoke, feeling their way into the dense blackness. The heat seared, even through their coats, and she could hear the groaning and cracking of a well-established fire. She fell against something soft and bulky, went down on her knees. Through a momentary thinning of the smoke she saw shapes piled above her like a giant child’s tower of blocks. The disjointed images suddenly coalesced.
“It’s furniture,” she said. “Someone’s piled up bloody furniture.” The polyurethane foam used in furniture cushions and mattresses was highly flammable – the thought of the devastating fire that had started in the furniture department of the Manchester Woolworth’s crossed her mind, but she banished it, concentrating on the job at hand.
Still on her knees, she moved forward, feeling her way round the obstacles, trying to find a suitable place to tie off the line. Suddenly, there was a loud crack, then a series of pops, and the heat bloomed as debris rained down on them.
“Flashover,” shouted Bryan. She felt him grab her waist belt. “We’ve got to get out of here. Forget the line, Rose.”
Even with Bryan ’s weight dragging at her, her momentum carried her another foot, her hand still outstretched with the line.
“I said forget the fucking line, Rose. Evacuate! Evacuate!”
Even though her stubbornness, her refusal to let the fire get the better of her, was one of the things that made her good at her job, she knew he was right. Going on would be suicidal, and nothing could have survived this blaze without protection.
Hemmed in on one side by a sofa, on the other by what seemed to be stacks of lumber, Rose tried to turn back the other way. As she maneuvered her body round, her gloved hand came down on something that yielded beneath her fingers. It felt malleable, like flesh, with the brittleness of bone beneath.
Rose looked down, blinking eyes burning and swollen from the heat, and felt the bile rise in her throat. “Jesus Christ,” she said. “We’ve got a body.”
On this morning there had been no drifting slowly into consciousness, no lingering in imagined wholeness, no savoring the memory of life as it used to be.
Fanny Liu opened her eyes and took stock, reluctantly. It was later than usual, that she could tell by the angle of light in the sitting room window, but still overcast, as it had been the previous day. She slept, as she had since she’d become unable to manage the stairs, on an old velvet-covered chaise longue that had belonged to her mother. For once in her life her small stature was a blessing – a few inches taller and her feet would have hung over the end of her makeshift bed. At night the arms of the chaise cradled her, offering a solid comfort; in the daytime her bedding could be tucked away, allowing her to maintain an illusion of normalcy.
Elaine had argued with her, of course, wanting to put a bed in the sitting room, but for once Fanny’s soft refusal had held sway over her roommate’s brisk efficiency. The wheelchair was bad enough. For Fanny, a bed in the sitting room would have meant admitting the possibility that she might not improve.
Her cat, Quinn, still lay curled on her feet. The only sound in the flat was his faint purring. It was the silence that had awakened her, Fanny suddenly realized. There were no footsteps upstairs, no sound of movement in the kitchen. Elaine was always up first, making coffee and puttering around the flat. Before leaving for her job as an administrative assistant at Guy’s Hospital, she allowed time to make Fanny tea and toast and helped her with her morning routine.
Perhaps Elaine had overslept, thought Fanny – but no, Elaine was as punctual as Big Ben. Could she be ill? “Elaine?” Fanny called out tentatively, pulling herself up by using the arms of the chaise. Her voice seemed to echo emptily, and a spark of fear shot through her. “Elaine?”
There was no answer.
Suddenly, Fanny remembered her dream, a jumbled nightmare of doors closing softly, and felt again the dream’s inexplicable sense of loss. It made her think of the deathbed watches she’d kept as a private nurse before her illness, of the way she’d felt when she’d awakened from an inadvertent doze and known instantly that her patient had died while she slept.
Just as she knew, now, as the silence closed around her, that the house was empty. The sound of the door closing in the night had been no dream.
Elaine was gone.
There was nothing Harriet Novak hated more than having to tell strangers that she attended Little Dorrit School. Grownups would smile and coo as if it were disgustingly sweet – which made Harriet wonder how many of them had ever actually read Little Dorrit - and kids looked at her as if she’d just teleported from another planet.
Not that the school itself was all that bad, she allowed, digging the toe of her trainer in the play yard dirt as she waited for the first bell. It was just that it sounded so God-awfully sickening – like telling people you were called Tiny Tim.
It helped to be prepared, Harriet had learned, knowledge a necessary defense against living in a Dickens-infested neighborhood. She’d read the biography in the school library and could tell people more about Dickens than most wanted to know. Charles Dickens’s father had been briefly imprisoned in Marshalsea Prison, just up the road, and twelve-year-old Charles had lived in lodgings nearby. This experience had stayed with him all his life, working its way into many of his books, and then his creations had come back to haunt the Borough. Not only did the area boast a Little Dorrit Court and a Little Dorrit Street, there was a Marshalsea Road, a Pickwick Street, and a Copperfield Street.
At least there was nothing named after Oliver Twist. Harriet thought Oliver a right little tosser, too sweet to be borne. Davey Copperfield she liked better. He was a bit soft on his dead mum, but at least he had bitten his horrid stepfather. Davey knew how to stand up for himself.
Harriet scowled, only half aware of the smoky tang in the air and the students straggling in the school gate. Her thoughts settled into a well-worn groove. Would it be better to have a wicked stepfather, like Davey, rather than a father who had walked out? He said he loved her, her dad, but if that was true, how could he have left them?
He told her lots of parents got divorced, that it was just something they would all have to learn to live with, but that didn’t stop her missing him. Nor had his moving out stopped her parents’ rows. She heard them when he came to pick her up, and other times she heard her mum on the phone with him.
The last argument h
ad been the worst, when her dad had taken her home hours late after her last weekend at his flat. Her mum had been sitting on the doorstep of their house, watching for them, and she’d run to the car as Harriet was getting out.
“You bastard, Tony, you selfish little shit,” her mother had shouted – her mother the surgeon, who was always in control, who had never raised her voice before this began. Her curly dark hair bloomed round her head as if energized by her anger; her jeans and jumper hung loosely on her too-thin frame, making her bones look as sharp as her voice. “You’re late, you don’t answer your bloody phone – does it ever occur to you that I might worry? Anything could have happened.”
Harriet stood frozen on the pavement. She’d glimpsed a movement in the open window of the flat next door and knew their neighbor was listening. In the street, a couple walking by with their dog pointedly looked away and increased their pace. She felt her face flush scarlet with embarrassment. “Mum, we only-”
“For God’s sake, Laura,” her father broke in. “We went to the bloody zoo. It was a nice day, and we stayed longer than we meant. Is that a crime?” His voice was level, tight, his face pinched.
“You were supposed to have Harriet back hours ago. You know the rules-”
“Mum, please,” said Harriet, hearing the mortifying quaver in her voice. Her throat ached, and a sharp pain seared her chest. “I’m fine, really. Can we please go in?”
Her father shot her an anguished glance. “Laura, let it go, okay? You’re upsetting Harriet-”
“I’m upsetting Harriet?” Her mother stepped back from the car, looking suddenly, dangerously, calm.
“Listen, it won’t happen again,” Tony said quickly, as if realizing his mistake. “Next time I’ll-”